Achieving high accuracy retrieval using intra-document term ranking

Most traditional ranking models roughly score the relevance of a given document by observing simple term statistics, such as the occurrence of query terms within the document or within the collection. Intuitively, the relative importance of query terms with regard to other individual non-query terms in a document can also be exploited to promote the ranks of documents in which the query is dedicated as the main topic. In this paper, we introduce a simple technique named intra-document term ranking, which involves ranking all the terms in a document according to their relative importance within that particular document. We demonstrate that the information regarding the rank positions of given query terms within the intra-document term ranking can be useful for enhancing the precision of top-retrieved results by traditional ranking models. Experiments are conducted on three standard TREC test collections.